Jill U Adams

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In February, the fast-food chicken joint Chick-fil-A did a good thing. The company announced that every chicken breast its workers hand filet will come from an animal raised without antibiotics. The restaurant chain joins other companies that have made similar commitments—most notably Chipotle, which markets its products as “meat with integrity.”.

Insomnia. “It’s a lifestyle thing; everybody’s got it,” says Gregg Jacobs, an insomnia specialist at the Sleep Disorders Center at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. More than half of American adults, when asked, report that they suffer from insomnia symptoms — trouble falling asleep or waking up during the night — a few times a week, according to the National Sleep Foundation.

Birding and butterflying have long been popular. With the advent of easy-to-use field guides and common, colorful names like neon skimmer and thornbush dasher, the pursuit of dragonflies and damselflies is finally taking off. By Jill U. Adams/Scans by Forrest L. Mitchell and James L. Some birders travel to new places, even far-off countries, to add to their life lists.

Japanese knotweed at Garnet Lake. Photograph by Paul Rischmiller, courtesy of the Adirondack Park Invasive Plant Program. “YOU GET A LITTLE BIT OF SHADE,” said Ryan Burkum, who was practically invisible in a clump of Japanese knotweed. He had wriggled in with a large squirt gun and was methodically injecting a prescription-strength pesticide into the stems.

Perhaps you’ve heard the claim that talking on the phone while driving is as risky as driving drunk. Indeed, a driving simulator study found “profound” impairments in both cellphone chatters and in people with a blood alcohol level of 0.08. But here’s the surprising thing: It doesn’t seem to make a difference whether drivers are using hand-held phones or hands-free systems.

River dams control water flow and help generate electricity, but they're a daunting barrier to fish swimming upstream to spawn. Various structures called fish passages are designed to get fish past dams, and they dot rivers across the Northeast United States. But a new analysis suggests they aren't working like they're supposed to, and fish aren't making it to where they need to go.

One of the most notorious and hard-to-treat bacteria in humans has been found in wildlife, according to a new study in the Journal of Wildlife Diseases . The researchers isolated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in two rabbits and a shorebird. Wild animals may act as an environmental reservoir for the disease from which humans could get infected.